( Eight minutes read)

From the rise and fall of political ideologues the list is long as to how the world transformed in the last 100 years in terms of demography, environment, geography, geopolitics, resources, art of war and global affairs needs to be analysed in some detail.

Why?

Because the world has never witnessed changes as enormous as it experienced in the last 100 years. Never in human history has such a transformation, both in qualitative and quantitative terms, taken place in such a short span of time.

Over the last 100 years, the world has changed tremendously, however one can identify eight major changes that occurred during the last 100 years, which not only transformed the world from a European-centric to post-colonial globalised world, but also changed the map of the world with the emergence of new states in Africa and Asia.

So what are these changes?

First, from 1.8 billion people in 1919, world population has swelled to 8 billion.

Second, while there were only 50 sovereign states in 1919, today there are 193 members of the UN.

Third, the widening of the technological and economic gap between the global North and South increased the level of unemployment.

Fourth, radical changes in the art of war as a result of the modernisation of weapons.

Fifth, because of modernisation and industrialisation, the state of infrastructure, financial institutions, factories and industries in 2022 is far superior to that in 1919.

Sixth, one can see a link between globalisation, information technology, geo-economics and ‘soft power’, as new types of power and catalysts of change.

Seventh, the greatest disaster to befall mankind and the most important event in the history of the western world had absolutely nothing to do with technology. 16 million people were killed during World War I, in World War II, 50 million people perished, out of which 20 million were killed in the then Soviet Union.

Eighth,  Scientists are starting to understand the world. And we are making strides in AI, robotics, sensors, networks, synthetic biology, materials science, space exploration and more every day.

The reality is that our lives have completely changed.

But is it for the better, or worse?

With the 20th century nearing an end, which shift’s have really shaped the modern world?

Is it the Microchip, the Smartphone, the Internet, Climate Change, or the recent Covid Pandemic that not only killed people, it changed the ways people lived, as well as their expectations of death.

Or

Was it?   Wars,  Transportation  Communications, Telephones, Television, Immigration, Education, Government tax collections,  Countries budget deficit,  Literacy, Super Market, Billionaires, Inequality, Slavery, and the Stock market all took off that had the biggest influences.

I venture that it is none of these. It is the technological changes that is changing the world in the form of ALGORITHMS.

If you think about it, society is in a very bad place. People rely on their phones, laptops and tablets for everything. Technology is a great thing, but most people have abused it. Are you letting technology take control of your life?

With limited resources on a limited planet, this is not a shift that is likely ever to change. In a thousand years or so, if society continues that long, the 20th century may well be viewed as the threshold when the modern world began – when humanity started to consider the future as well as the present and the past.

Technology hugely changed the ways in which we lived and died in the 20th century, however, it also masks changes that are arguably even more profound –  they are Machine Learning Algorithms that give computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed. The process of learning is simply, learning automatically with no human intervention from experience or observations and to adjust their perform actions accordingly. Machine learning algorithms are now involved in more and more aspects of everyday life from what one can read and watch, to how one can shop, to who one can meet and how one can travel.

There is a fascinating trend happening where ready to use machine learning algorithms for speech recognition, language translation, text classifications, and many other tasks are now being offered as web-based services on cloud computing platforms, significantly increasing the audience of developers that can use them and making it easier than ever to put together solutions that apply machine learning at a high level.

In general, machine learning algorithms are categorized into two main types. The first type is known as supervised learning, in which our goal is to predict some output variable that’s associated with each input item. Supervised learning needs to have a training set with labelled objects to make its predictions.

The second major class of machine learning algorithms is called unsupervised learning, in which input data don’t have any labels to go with the data. Unsupervised learning allows us to approach problems with little or no idea about the final result.

These algorithms rapidly process huge datasets and give helpful insights into knowledge that permits awesome healthcare services.

Some deep learning applications are in natural language processing, video processing, recommendation systems, disease prediction, drug discovery, speech recognition, web content filtering, etc.

As the scope for learning algorithms evolves, the applications for deep learning grows drastically.

Try to remember what life was like before you were attached to technology by the hip to Big Data that supports the nature of deep learning algorithms.  Impossible.

Machine learning algorithms employ probability theory and that is you’re probably reading this on your phone right now.

The average person will check their phone every six and a half minutes.

Out of technology there is one other development that is changing the world.

CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing technology, will enables us to reprogram life as we know it.

News and online newsfeeds are increasingly full of stories of what will happen, not what has happened.

While climate change will enhance the most important relationship in human history between mankind and the land, basically, the more land you have, the more natural resources you have but the day is fast approaching when humanity will be eventually be programmed out of us along with our connection the earth.

As is well known, money has existed for thousands of years. However, that doesn’t mean it has always served the same function as it does today.  Money to day is data.

To what extent the culture of NGOs can helped deal with critical issues faced by the world today is debatable.

Our world organisation all need to be revamped to reflect responsibility all over the world – and hope for the best.

All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com